Microsoft expands xRM initiative

Jul 14, 2009 08:46 GMT  ·  By

The Worldwide Partner Conference 2009 acted as the stage where Microsoft applauded passing the one million users milestone with Dynamics CRM. On the official Dynamics CRM website, the Redmond company is inviting potential customers to access feedback delivered by existing business users of the product. The software giant emphasized flexibility, fast deployment and affordability as the factors driving the adoption of its customer relationship management solution. One million users is equivalent to one million reasons to adopt Dynamics CRM, available not only on-premise, but also through partner-hosted offerings and in the Cloud through CRM Online deployment.

“Our fast path to more than 1 million users illustrates our strong market momentum, and shows how our CRM and xRM offerings are driving worldwide customer and partner success,” explained Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. “Today, hundreds of Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers are building thousands of xRM applications. We’ve built significant alliances within and across Microsoft to capitalize on these high-growth opportunities, and we’re ready to drive value for our next million customers.”

Customers looking to build relationship-tracking applications beyond what CRM can offer by default will be able to leverage new sales and marketing programs designed for the xRM development platform. The software giant indicated that new platform licensing options were in place, and that XRM had been closely aligned with existing Microsoft technologies including SQL Server, and SharePoint just to name two. The end purpose of the xRM expansion is to cut down the costs and amount of time necessary to develop on-premise or on-demand CRM solutions.

“Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a rapid business application development platform has created tremendous opportunity for Ascentium,” said Mark Barrett, managing partner at Ascentium, the Partner of the Year for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. “Almost 70 percent of our customers use Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a line-of-business application or xRM.”